Childhood snapshots - (in the memory of my late father)

                                                                        C
                  Blogging from A to Z [April 2015]

A childhood buried

across the border

a yellow tri-cycle
shared with siblings
a permanent bite mark
on the left earlobe
for an extra dollop of butter

watermelons thrown in wells to cool
delicacies cooking all day
in mud pots on slow fire

radios as magic boxes

with voices trapped

djinns and fairies

who could light a bulb

in Rawalpindi*

 

a school across the river

where first alphabet was Urdu

in black homemade ink

on wooden writing boards

swimming lessons

self-taught in Jhelum**

religion a happy word

and trains that could

one day bring FREEDOM

 

playing hide and seek

on full moon nights

in the cobbled lanes

fields, cow sheds

 

and one day a label

that stuck lifelong

- Refugee

 

He chose a full moon night

to say the final goodbye
 

I'd like to believe

they were waiting

up there

Kartar, Ashfaq

and others whose names
I didn't know

to play hide and seek

around the moon.

 

* Rawalpindi is a city in Pakistan, close to where my father was born in 1934.

** Jhelum is a vast river where my father learned to swim with his childhood friends.